75481 - The notion of containment

N. Lygeros

The notion of containment  was known long time ago and of course it was used in US even against the expansion of slavery. The anti-slavery forces built a cordon of freedom around slavery. The purpose was to force the slave states one by one to abandon slavery. In the same spirit, after the revolution of  Bolsheviks, Georges Clemenceau used the expression cordon sanitaire to describe a  ring of free countries to isolate Soviet Russia. This idea was followed by Woodrow Wilson who called it quarantine. The Allies at the World War I tried to create at the same time an eastern front against Germany, and an economic warfare against Bolsheviks. That is the reason why we consider that the notion of containment wasn’t exclusively a notion of the Cold War. All the previous allies had already the same goal, to try to avoid the expansion of the Soviet System in Europe. For US the violations of the Yalta Agreement concerning Poland was another reason to reinforce their position about the idea of containment because they realized that the Soviets will be also opposed to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.